The addition of the start command does open a new window, and transfers the focus to it. On my computer, it does not execute the dir command. And still this does not help with your problem. Once having done the dir command, what do you want to do next? I think that will dictate whether or not you can handle this with a properly formatted commandline or need to interact with the window in a way that the Win32 modules will allow. Do you just need a list of files? There are simpler ways to get that without using system.